It is up for debate whether Ayn Rand could have taken the money that she'd have gotten back in her SS checks and have done better with investing that money or not.

She certainly didn't do better with the money that wasn't taxed (or she wouldn't have needed social security in the first place). So why would we expect her to have done better with the money that was taxed?

Furthermore, she, who was supposed to be the pinnacle of personal responsibility, failed to be responsible for her own life. How can we expect those who have fewer opportunities that her, to be more responsible than her?

That's like saying that someone who opposed Communism that waited in a food line in the Soviet Union was hypocritical for taking food from the government while opposing it.

The difference is that Ayn Rand railed against the program for years, and in the end she needed it. It's not hypocrisy that she took the money that undermines her entire credo. It's the hypocrisy that she claimed no one truly needed the safety nets of society, that only parasites would use them, that it was easy to live your life without ever needing to use them. The hypocrisy is that after spending years claiming no one should need them and having been given every opportunity to ensure that she did not need them, she failed to live up to her own minimum standards. She failed to do what she had declared was not only simple, but the duty of every American. She failed to stand on their own two feet. She, who had so much more opportunity for success than so many of her fellows, was not able to do what she claimed everyone should be able to do. So, in the end, everything she claimed and stood for was exposed as arrogance and wishful thinking.

Safety nets exist because even good people can stumble and fall, and it's a shame that Ayn Rand was never able to understand and admit that. She was so wrapped up in her bolsephobia that she was never able to see the government in a rational light. It is a bigger shame that she has a legion of parrots who look only to her ideas and ignore her reality because it suits their wishful thinking to do so.

I would love to see a "Left Wing Mutual Fund" that is fully divested of all the "bad" things that left wing protests about, and follows all the left wing bullshit they want others to follow. My guess is, that without substantial government "investments" it would simply be a big fail, which is why you don't actually ever see one.

An open and free market for technological innovation will save the environment, not mimicking failed God damned central planning from last century.

No, it won't. Most corporations aren't in the business of protecting the environment, so they won't. And that is really all there is to it: bottom line, if the people running a corporation don't think protecting the environment will improve the quarterly earnings, they won't do it. If you want to protect the environment you are going to need checks and balances, and in this world, that means government intervention.

It seems that, to mangle an aphorism, absolute power corrupts the environment absolutely.

I think the editors need to expand the Q&A FAQ. They usually say they will pick 10 of the highest rated questions to send along, so I don't think Brianna Wu actually picked the questions. The editors would probably filter out any questions they thought would be offensive to the interviewee, so likely the "hard" questions wouldn't have been sent along.

Also, I'd note that many of the so-called "hard" questions could easily be categorized as "bullshit" or "harassment" questions.

It's not the 1970s any more. America is close to being a net exporter of oil now, and is a net exporter of energy overall.

Not according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, U.S. energy exports are only 43% of your imports. Crude exports are a mere 5% of your imports. The total amount of exports is also overstated because the U.S. imports crude oil from Canada, refines it and then exports it to other countries, thus inflating your export total as a percentage. So, America has a 5 million barrel a day deficit between imports and exports. Total U.S. production is about 8.7 million barrels a day, so you'd need to increase U.S. production by about 60% before you could become a net exporter of energy, which would put your production target at about 4 million barrels a day more than the U.S produced at it's previous peak production.

It also has tons of advantages
Which is why in any country that isn't taxed the hell out of, it's the preferred power source.

It has one advantage, it's cheap, and it's the preferred power source when coal isn't taxed (or more commonly where it's actually subsidized), because it's cheap. Additionaly, since most of the disadvantages are either invisible (for example, cancers caused by radioactive coal soot) or are somebody else's problem (like coal sludge dumped in someone else's water supply), those costs are not factored into the average user's decisions.

Actually, yes. Your solution may or may not be ideal, unfortunately, it has no relevance at all to what I was talking about. If you would like to comment on why your plan would be better for the poor than a tax refund, please do so. However, you neglected to provide any reasons why your solution would be actually be better for anyone, and since I was merely explaining how a carbon tax could actually be beneficial rather than detrimental to the poor people of America, your comment seems a little lost.

would drop our use of fuel oil (which mostly comes from venezuela)

Assuming you're American, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, that doesn't seem to have been true since the early 90s, it seems to mostly come from Canada recently (6.5 million barrels per month out of total imports of 7 million barrels).

Anybody with a 3rd grade math education can still see that the result is that everybody is going to be pushed to products that cost more - and thus it will hurt the poor and elderly the most even if they do return 100% of the money to the people.

That depends entirely on how you return the money. If you return the money as an income tax rate reduction, then yes, it will hurt the poor the most because they will spend the largest percentage of their income on the tax and receive virtually no tax relief (since they don't pay much income tax) and the vast majority of the benefit would go to the wealthiest eligible recipients (who pay the most the income tax and thus benefit the most from a rate reduction). On the other hand, if the money is divided equally and provided as a flat refund to each person, the poor will tend to get the most benefit from the refund because it will provide the largest percentage increase in their income/spending power. You should be able to agree that a $100 dollar refund is more meaningful to someone on a low fixed income than to someone with a million-dollar-a-year income.

Anyone who tries to demonstrate that AGW isn't real is shouted down pretty fast without much of a hearing.

It would help if they presented something new that even vaguely resembled science, rather than the same old tired innuendo and baseless accusations. I'm about ready to punch the next person who smugly claims that scientists don't know that the sun exists and that it warms the earth.

Are those pictures all supposed to be the same room? Because the rather large window from the first picture is clearly missing from the last picture.

Also, clearly a picture taken 10 days after she supposed fled her house, where she might be in that same house indicates that she never left it right? I mean it's not like she could have, say, left for a week and then returned in the space of 10 days? Right?

Clearly, this evidence is overwhelming proof of guilt, we should execute the victim immediately.

It's a long walk, and I'd rather not show up to work sweaty from a bike ride, thanks. The issue is not whether walking or biking is better than a bus, though.

Perhaps, although it might be that making a reasonable comparison between transit options is better than making an unreasonable comparison. Someone who has a 5 minute commute from home to a workplace with ample parking is not an ideal candidate for most public transit solutions. Because the commute is so short, the amount of time spent waiting for the public transit tends to dwarf the regular commute time. Combined with a negligible parking cost, there would be little external incentive for anyone to go to the effort required to even consider changing their behaviour.